17.03%

CTR

16.29%

Conversion rate

$3.50

CPA

Customer acquisition isn’t easy—it's the elusive unicorn of the financial services realm. That’s why we were stoked to start tracking them when Western Union asked us to run a direct response campaign to drive new customers.

THE OPPORTUNITY:

Scouting out the herd.

Western Union is a money transfer service that allows people to send money across the world to over 200 countries. To stay on top of their game, Western Union needed to continue to find new customers in an oversaturated market. Where white-label partnerships were requiring deep technical integrations for limited payoff, direct response campaigns would be a simple alternative that would provide immediate results. We even mocked up some display ads personifying money to consider in their strategy.

How do you make your ads stand out among other finance competitors—many of whom are also competing for the same ad placements?

Our Strategy

The Process:

Add some secret sauce.

We quickly set to work building our unicorn radar with killer search campaign copy, strategic keywords, and suggested landing page improvements. Copy is always at the heart of any search campaign so we ensured our copywriters took the unicorn by the horn on that one.

As we preach in our free digital marketing plan, we strategize using long tail keywords for better CTRs and cheaper CPAs. Hundreds of keywords like “transfer money from US to New Zealand” and “bank to bank wire transfers usd to pounds” let our dedicated media buyers find potential customers with the highest purchase intent and keep costs down.

Pro tip: Quality Score is not limited to a specific ad in Adwords. Google also applies a global quality score to your entire account so if you have poor performing ads from previous campaigns, any new campaigns in the same account will inherit a poor quality score. The result will be higher CPCs than what your competitors are paying. If your account has not been performing as well as you’d like it to, a different account with better historical CTRs and conversion rates may help! At One Net we can manage your ad campaigns in our account to give you the benefit of our long-standing account reputation as a certified Google Partner. With some clients this has lowered their CPAs by as much as 60%.

In the end we found unicorns for Western Union—and we found them fast! Here are our display ad concept sketches that we provided to Western Union’s design team. Check out the results to see how our glittering herd of search ads compared to Google Adwords’ Benchmark data in the finance and insurance industry.

Our Solution

The Results

How we stack up.

Western Union vs. Industry Average

17.03%

CTR(western union)

2.65%

CTR(industry average)

$0.57

CPC(western union)

$3.72

CPC(industry average)

16.29%

CTR(western union)

7.19%

CTR(industry average)

$3.50

CPA(western union)

$51.74

CPA(industry average)

The Moral of the Story

Taking it ‘Next level’.

We’re constantly optimizing our campaigns based on real-time conversion data. For Western Union, targeting desktop users was always the primary goal, but with an approved portion of the budget, we stayed on lookout for a particularly elusive unicorn—the mobile unicorn. When we saw that users were completing sign ups on their phones, we knew there was a compelling reason to create mobile-specific search campaigns.

With evidence in hand, the client happily gave us additional budget to expand the mobile campaigns and acquire more customers. We wrote new copy to appeal to users on the go and launched our mobile campaigns two days later. The result? —An increase in the mobile CTR by 27% and the conversion rate by 11%!

"The search campaigns brought in more customers than we expected at a fraction of the cost that we were getting in other ways. My custom reporting dashboard lets me see the results in real-time and the entire process with One Net has been seamless. Would definitely recommend."